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Beyond the Buzz, Red Hook Remembers

Ive never felt this sense of community anywhere else, said Kenneth Berry, far right, one of 2,000 current and former Red Hook residents who attended Old Timers Day last week.Credit
Klaus Schoenwiese for The New York Times

AT midday on the Thursday before last, 57-year-old Richard Edward Hill put on his Panama hat, picked up his hand-carved walking stick, left his trailer home in the southwest Florida town of Punta Gorda and began the journey back to his roots. Climbing gingerly aboard a Cubana bus, he settled down for the 22-hour ride to Manhattan, a trip that would be sweetened by the little Spanish cookies that are served to passengers, and the movies played throughout the night.

That same Thursday, 3,000 miles away in Sacramento, Danny Williams reminded his boss at Verizon that he had to take the next day off; at 11:30 that night, he boarded JetBlue’s red-eye to Kennedy International Airport.

And at 5 a.m. the next day, Al Barnard and his 20-year-old daughter, Courtney, packed pillows, blankets and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies in his silver Saturn sedan and headed north from Virginia Beach, Va., for the 360-mile trip to New York.

Like homing pigeons, they and about 2,000 other current and former residents of Red Hook Houses gathered in Brooklyn last weekend for Old Timers Day, a beloved and sometimes bittersweet rite of summer for people who grew up in the project, the largest in the borough.

No one knows exactly how many of the city’s 344 public housing projects hold Old Timers Days. They are seldom listed on events calendars, are rarely announced by anything more formal than phone calls and word of mouth, and are neither subsidized nor endorsed by the New York City Housing Authority. Still, in the world of the projects, Old Timers Days are bona fide holidays, and dozens take place around the city.

Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn holds its Old Timers Day on the second Saturday in August. Harlem River Houses in Manhattan holds Old Timers Days whenever enough money can be scraped together for food and permits.

An Old Timers Day that was started in 1963 by residents of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and draws heavily from local housing projects has mushroomed into Old Timers Week, held at the end of July and attended by thousands. Pelham Parkway Houses in the Bronx held its first Old Timers Day last month.

In Red Hook, where Old Timers Day has been held for two decades, the event, on the second Sunday in August, is a moment for warmth and nostalgia. But it is also a reminder of a grim past and a complicated future.

Red Hook has been celebrated as one of the city’s newest hip neighborhoods, increasingly attractive to both artists and luxury developers. A bakery on Van Brunt Street sells three kinds of homemade granola, a specialty liquor store offers green-tea vodka and $425 magnums of vintage Champagne, and Fairway supermarket established a 52,000-square-foot beachhead in the neighborhood in May.

Yet for all the breathless anointing of Red Hook as the next big thing, it is still, largely, the province of the projects. According to the 2000 census, they are home to 70 percent of the neighborhood’s approximately 10,000 people, and despite the arrival of more affluent residents, local real estate agents say those numbers have not changed significantly in recent years. The median annual income in the Red Hook Houses is among the lowest in the city. Only within the past decade have the using and selling of drugs abated somewhat.

For both those who have stayed and those long gone, Old Timers Day represents a moment to savor. “I don’t care what happens all year long, I’m going to be there,” said Mr. Barnard, who has attended nearly every Old Timers Day for 15 years. “Red Hook is home.”

‘Versailles for the Millions’

Red Hook Houses was built in 1938, just a year after the passage of the United States Housing Act of 1937, legislation designed not only to provide housing for the poor, but also to spur the economy as the country began to recover from the Depression. The site, a congested but bustling maritime community cradled by the Erie Basin, Buttermilk Channel and Gowanus Bay, was one of the country’s busiest shipping centers.

A total of 161 houses, which were home to more than 300 families, were demolished, to be replaced by 27 six-story brown brick buildings containing 2,545 apartments. In 1955, three more residential buildings, with 346 apartments, were added.

On Feb. 27, 1939, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia laid the cornerstone for the new development; inside were copies of the United States Housing Act, contracts for the project, half a dozen photographs showing how the site originally looked, a copy of The New York Times of that day, and a brand-new penny, presumably for luck.

One of the few moments to mar the ceremonial pomp occurred when Delancey Smith, a 71-year-old bricklayer whose home had been razed to make room for the project, approached the mayor and announced: “The hell I wanted to move. This house was handed down to me by my mother. They clubbed me into selling it.”

The elderly bricklayer was not alone in objecting to aspects of the new development. In a 1940 article in The New Yorker titled “Versailles for the Millions,” Lewis Mumford criticized what he regarded as the “Leningrad formalism” of Red Hook Houses and dismissed the buildings as “barracklike” and “hygienically undesirable.”

“What is wrong with this design,” Mumford wrote, “is its unnecessary monotony.”

Still, the mostly three- and four-room apartments were praised for possessing modern conveniences like electric refrigerators, central heating and gas ranges. And at perhaps $5 or $6 per room per month, the rent was lower than the rent in private housing in the city. Making the development even more attractive was Red Hook Pool, a giant project of Robert Moses that sat just across the street.

Not surprisingly, applications for the new apartments poured in, at a rate of 1,200 a week.

‘Crazy Corner,’ ‘Junkie Paradise’

No one is sure when Red Hook’s first Old Timers Day took place, but most residents say it was around 1984, when a group of young men — the original tenants’ children who used to hang out together at a local community center — wanted to do something nice for the neighborhood.

So they decided to have a party. They raised money by holding a dance at a nearby tennis club. They bought huge quantities of hot dogs, hamburgers and soda, and sawed a metal trash can in half to make a grill. The event was held in a small park on Lorraine Street, in the project’s southeast corner. A neighborhood guy named Humza played music out of his van and sold mix tapes he had made. Everyone danced and played basketball. About 100 people came.

Today, Old Timers Day, which is held in Coffey Park, a leafy, eight-acre site with winding paths and weathered benches just west of Red Hook Houses, is not much different from the way it was 20 years ago, just bigger. This year, people came not only from the projects but from as far away as Georgia, Kansas and California. The first of them trickled into the park shortly before noon to set up folding tables spread with roast pork, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese topped with breadcrumbs.

People pored over yellowing photographs, referring to sections of the projects with old nicknames that still stick today: Peyton Place, Poor Block, Junkie Paradise, Crazy Corner, Flagpole, Slide Time. Despite the rough sound of some of those names, the old-timers recalled the Red Hook Houses of their youth as an idyllic small town, where doors were left unlocked and neighbors looked out for one another.

Cheerful clans paraded about by the dozen, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren were proudly introduced. The smell of hot dogs and grilled chicken hovered around smoky barbecues. The basketball courts and playground on the park’s south side were packed.

Leslie Gibbs, a sturdy 50-year-old with a neatly clipped mustache who was memorable to old-timers as D. J. Leslie G. of a local group called the Disco Enforcers, played soul and disco classics over a booming sound system. A dozen couples danced in a hustle contest on a roped-off circle of asphalt.

Perched on a bench was Rachel McNair, a silver-haired 85-year-old who had taught Sunday school at nearby Red Hook Gospel Tabernacle for nearly half a century. Like many of the party’s older guests, she was something of a celebrity; three generations of project residents approached her with pecks on the cheek and greetings of “Hello, Sister McNair.”

Kenneth Berry, 57, strutted through the park like a football star striding down the corridors of high school, slapping hands and smiling at the girls. Mr. Berry, who moved to Red Hook Houses with his family when he was an infant, has a shiny bald head, wire-rim glasses and a little of the pudginess that earned him his childhood nickname, Porky. This particular Old Timers Day was especially poignant for him; it was only the second one he had attended in 20 years.

As a boy, Mr. Berry and his friends got into considerable mischief, raiding a local lumberyard for wood to build tree houses and proving their manhood by diving off the docks. As teenagers, they smoked marijuana and drank Wild Irish Rose. When he was 17, the mischief turned into something much more; Mr. Berry tried heroin, and the next 38 years of his life were swept away by the drug.

During those years, Mr. Berry often ran into old friends from the projects, and they tried to coax him into making an appearance at Old Timers Day. “Everybody saw me and said, ‘You got to be there,’ “ he recalled. “But it’s kind of a shame to see everybody else doing all right, and they see you’re not doing all right.”

Two years ago Mr. Berry entered a residential rehabilitation program. He now lives in a group home in East New York, Brooklyn, and attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings several times a week. “I crept back into Old Timers Day last year for the first time,” he said.

He chuckled over some of the reactions he heard at the event this year. “They say, ‘You still alive?’ One girl told me, ‘Damn, I thought you were doing 25 to life.’ I say: ‘No, it ain’t like that, honey. I’m still hanging around.’ ”

Taking a sip of brandy and orange soda from a Styrofoam cup, he gazed affectionately over the crowd in Coffey Park. “I’ve never felt this sense of community anywhere else,” he said. “I come here and friends say: ‘Listen, man, we don’t care what you’re doing. We still love you.’ Out here, it’s genuine.”

Moochie’s Tale

There is a sense at Old Timers Day that the happiest are those who made it out — those who show up for an afternoon to reminisce about the good old days, then head back to stable jobs, healthy families and pretty homes elsewhere.

Then there are those like Moochie, who declined to give his last name. Along with his mother, he moved to the projects in 1983, when he was 8, and ever since, he has lived there off and on.

In his eyes, the projects are not so much a well of nostalgia but a rough and sometimes scary terrain. “See those knuckleheads?” he said during a lull in the festivities, eyeing two teenage boys wearing black baseball caps atop shoulder-length dreadlocks. “They’re Bloods.”

Moochie, 30, who is shaped like a small boulder, got involved in the drug trade when he was 9. His father, a heroin addict, died of AIDS in jail; a drug dealer on his block became something of a surrogate father.

In the late 1980’s and early 90’s, when Moochie was in his teens, Red Hook Houses was a notorious hub of the crack trade. Almost nightly, shootouts forced people in apartments to jump to the floor to dodge stray gunfire. A 1988 article about the projects in Life magazine noted that vials of crack were sold out of an ice cream truck and neighborhood candy stores peddled drug paraphernalia. Red Hook’s reputation for drug-fueled violence was solidified in 1992 by the killing Patrick Daly, the revered principal of a local elementary school, who was caught in a crossfire between rival drug gangs.

Moochie worked as part of a team of six who earned $2,500 a day selling crack on their block. But his hustling days came to a messy end, and between 1994 and 2003, he served six years in prison for drug-related offenses.

He last left prison three years ago, and he insists that his drug-dealing days are behind him. But the marks on his body — a stabbing scar on his right thigh, scars from a pitchfork stuck in his right forearm, a bullet scar on his left ankle, and a faint white line where a knife went through his cheek and tore out a tooth — paint a grim map of his involvement in crack’s heyday.

Lumbering through the crowd at Old Timers Day, he seems to see few people he knows. “A lot of my generation, they’re in prison or they died,” he said ruefully. “Hassan. Curt. Bo. Buff. Devon. Monique. Chickenface. I lost a good 12 or 13 people.”

In that, he is hardly alone. In front of the D. J.’s table were propped up three collages of programs from memorial services for project residents who died in recent years. Some succumbed to old age or accidents, but many to drugs and violence.

A ‘Vibrant Neighborhood’

By some barometers, life in Red Hook Houses is better than it was 10 or 15 years ago. From 1995 to 2005, the number of murders fell 75 percent, robberies were down 62 percent and reported assaults dropped 45 percent. In May, a major police sweep led to the indictment of 143 people in a $250 million drug conspiracy, culminating an 18-month investigation into a highly organized operation that the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said pervaded the projects and netted $50 million annually.

At the same time, most people living in the projects still struggle mightily. According to the latest census figures, the median annual income is just over $10,000 a year, and one in three adults is unemployed. And although project residents survived decades of drugs and violence, they are not sure they will survive the arrival of chic.

“The city kicked us to the curb,” said Mr. Berry, the 57-year-old. “Now they say we got a ‘vibrant neighborhood.’ I mean, it’s a good thing that the neighborhood is coming up, but you got people here who’ve been through it all. What are you going to do, just shuttle them to the Bronx?”

By then it was late, and even those who crowded the park as midnight approached, silhouettes in the dark, laughing and dancing, were ready to call it a day. Near the D. J., a circle of middle-aged men passed around a hand-held microphone and rapped in the clever, goofy style of early hip-hop. “Where my Red Hook crew at?” one man shouted out to the crowd. A forest of arms waved in the air.